Americans are currently embracing a strange sort of primitivism. Bicycles are losing gears, runners are afoot in shoes designed to create a barefoot sensation (some are even running barefoot), and men are growing bushy Will Oldham-like beards. It's all very curious and entertaining.

It may be the most emotionally powerful photograph to come out of the Great Depression: the well-dressed, unemployed business man hawking apples for a nickel on a city street corner. It's a poignant image-the stoic gentleman attempting to preserve a vestige of dignity for himself and his family. But is it an accurate reflection of the era?

Food packaging seems like a straightforward problem with a straightforward solution: there's too much of it; it piles up in landfill; we should reduce it. These opinions are standard among environmentalists, many of whom have undertaken impassioned campaigns to shroud consumer goods-including food-in less and less plastic, cardboard, and aluminum.

Food is fiction, after all, and there are many advantages to keep telling beautiful stories that brighten our day by enriching our palette. Plus, the moment we might start thinking about the culinary implications of a riot, things can become pretty tasteless.

If you ever find yourself in a room full of pig farmers and want to start a fight, just ask about farrowing crates. A farrowing crate is a cage that confines a lactating sow. Its dimensions are tight — a typical crate enables a mother pig to move a few inches in any direction.

A crated pig can do little more than lie on her side, position her nipples in the right direction, and provide mother's milk to her piglets on the other end of prison-like bars. Some farmers deem this confined arrangement the cruelest manifestation of factory farming.

Sustainably produced local food is not accessible by all. In general, only the elite few with the time and material resources to capitalize on such environmental munificence have the time and money to benefit from transparently sustainable farms. As a result, the preconditions are inadvertently established for something that generally tends not to bind diverse communities into a cozy whole, but to fragment them: exclusivity.